Spring has sprung and so have my migraines. Right now I want to curl into a bitty-bitty ball and whine for my mommy. But my fandom addiction is such that I'm on LJ, sitting in the dark (oh, the light, it burns...). Does typing on a keyboard count as operating heavy machinery? No? Then let's get out of me-zone and talk about...

a2zmomCoincidentally enough, a2zmom and myself created our lj accounts on the same freakin' day. But unlike me, she's a woman with a past and had been active on TwoP prior to her LJ incarnation. So she entered LJ with a history and an flist. *g*

I first ran across her on open_on_sunday, the BtVS/AtS drabble community. She's instantly recognizable because she's a one-icon woman and it's hard to ignore that big grin with WEIRD flashing in big red animated letters at you. Back in my new newbie days (I still consider myself one, almost a year and a half in), I tried to respond to the majority of the drabbles posted there. And I noticed that so does she. Well, I fizzled out of that within 6 months but she still does it. Which impresses the hell out of me. And what also impresses me is that she gives good drabble too:

Even years later, an unexpected scent would cause the world to fall away.

Once more, he’d feel his teeth tearing into flesh, the salt and metal tang of hot blood filling his mouth. He’d see the half-second of primal fear in Buffy’s eyes before she threw him off. He’d hear Willow’s soft cry as he cruelly mocked her.

Then the world would come back into focus. He told himself that he had been taken over by a malevolent spirit, but he secretly wondered if a beast had always dwelled within him and the hyena had only released the ugly truth.

Although she hasn't written much fic, she does have a few B/A pieces. This one is particularly stunning:

Fifteen minutes later, she found him alone in a gallery, intent on sketching the painting in front of him. He didn’t appear to even notice that someone else had entered. Finally, he half turned and stared at her with a mixture of shock and disbelief. When he whispered her name, she could hear the bitterness and anger. In all the time she had spent running and hiding, it had never occurred to her that he might be doing the same thing. She remembered, sadly, a time when her name was a sacrament, but she wasn’t surprised that she was no longer the cornerstone of his religion.

He looked totally different and yet, completely unchanged. His hair was lighter with glints of the sun in it, his forearm was scraped, his cheeks were slightly blushed, he had on a powder blue polo shirt and jeans, At a glance, he looked like every other executive that lived and worked in New York. But his eyes were the same. Too old, too tired, too much seen and done. She had a hundred questions, a thousand wounds to reopen until the blood choked both of them, a million issues to dissect, mount on a board, preserve in amber. She pushed all of it away. “Are you happy?”

What I like here is the wistfulness, the chasm of hurt and loss rediscovered in a musuem gallery. The setting here is crucial because of its prosaicness. Galleries are empty rooms wherein all movement is directed, pinpointed, to a crucial place. This meeting, this moment in time, *is* that crucial place. Later, Manet's "The Dance", and the recreation of that, will bring our focus to movement, one moment of joy set against the bleak backdrop of that room.

This is B/A for me. Because the past *matters*. It colors everything we do. It propels us into the future, but it can't predict that future. There are moments, choices, laughter. We are where we choose to be, no matter how compelling *or* repelling the circumstances are. The precipice, and the leap from it, is infinite.

I know many people eschew the romanticism of B/A. But really, there's more to it than that.